Eliza Lynn Linton (10 February 1822 – 14 July 1898) was the first female salaried journalist in Britain and the author of over 20 novels.

[2] The death of her mother when Eliza was five months old meant a chaotic upbringing, in which she was largely self-educated, but in 1845 she left home to earn her living as a writer in London.

[3] After moving to Paris, she married W. J. Linton in 1858,[4] an eminent wood-engraver, who was also a poet of note, a writer on his craft, and a Chartist agitator.

She moved into his ramshackle house, Brantwood, in the Lake District, with his seven children from an earlier marriage, and wrote there a novel set locally: Lizzie Lorton of Greyrigg.

[7][3] Linton arrived in London in 1845 as a protégée of the novelist William Harrison Ainsworth and the poet Walter Savage Landor.

In 1891, she wrote "Wild Women as Politicians", explaining her view that politics were naturally the sphere of men, as was fame of any sort.

Her obituary in The Times noted her "animosity towards all, or rather, some of those facets which may be conveniently called the 'New Woman'," but added that "it would perhaps be difficult to reduce Mrs. Lynn Linton's views on what was and what was not desirable for her own sex to a logical and connected form."